


vertere

by notthebees



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Psychological Trauma, Tags added as chapters are posted, Trauma, a friendship/something maybe more that develops slowly, guilt and shame
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-26 18:07:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14407593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notthebees/pseuds/notthebees
Summary: Billie Lurk flees the bloodbath in the Flooded District, grappling with her own messy role in it and her association with the witch Delilah. Cecelia makes a break from the Hound Pits after the killing, hoping for a new start elsewhere. They cross paths, become unlikely companions, and together confront questions of identity, guilt, choice, and whether a better life is possible after a person is violently unmade.





	1. After

In the instant of transversal, between the snap out of this plane and the re-knitting of her body elsewhere, Billie has a brief moment of blank bright peace in which there is no Billie—Billie is simply _not_ —and then, as soon as it’s begun, it’s over, and the entire catastrophe is real again.

A wretched mess, is what it had been. A fucking disaster. There’s little time to apportion blame, though (despite there being plenty to go around) because Billie needs to move. She blinks from rooftop to rooftop, in and out of the deafening white buzz of transversal, and the visions of dead Whalers and drowned Overseers and the look on Daud’s face as she sheathed her sword and the whole world fell away—these images follow her, but so long as she keeps moving they can only lick at her heels.

She’s not worried about Daud changing his mind, but the others…. She doubts any of them will understand why she did what she did—or that she could even justify it to them anyway—and those that survived without grave wounds will be grieving fallen comrades, brothers, friends. They’ll be angry and hurting. Daud won’t come after her, but any of them might; Billie wants to get out of Dunwall—preferably out of Gristol—as quickly as possible, not because she fears retribution visited upon her by the surviving men ( _her men, they’d as good as been—hers to command—hers to betray_ ), but because she doesn’t want to be forced to kill them if they try. She leaps, blinks, emerges and stumbles on the roof tiles of an old stone building, preoccupied by the thought, rising unbidden, of having to stick her blade through the ribs of a man she’d likely sat with that morning over breakfast. _Which would be worse: seeing the furious anguish on his face—the hurt confusion—or for him to remain masked and for her not to know whom she was cutting down?_ Even so, she’d know him by his voice, she thinks, catching herself and continuing to run parallel to the sloping roof in the direction of the river. _Which would be worse: to know whose blood coats her sword, or not? Knowing or not knowing?_

This is immaterial. It won’t come to that, and if it does...well, they chose that fate for themselves, didn’t they? Doesn’t everyone choose for themselves? She pauses, takes a few deep breaths to recenter herself, willing her mind carefully blank, like smoothing the wrinkles from a blanket. Exhale. _There. Now, what’s the plan?_

The plan _after_ , that is. Billie Lurk has an uncanny ability to churn out short-term plans like bricks from a mould being laid rapidly just one or two paces ahead of her steps: neat, efficient, hard. There is no past, present, and future—only the _now_ , the _next_ , and the _after_. Billie has no use for after, and planning for it is a waste. Not only does _after_ for someone who lives as she does likely entail a gruesome and (hopefully) sudden death that it isn’t wise to dwell on, but, in her experience, being good enough at planning for the _next_ renders planning for the _after_ unnecessary. And Billie is very good at deciding in an instant, and with preternatural precision, what comes next. 

In this case, the now is her position on the roof of a flooded chemist’s; the next is the chest of wages—a decade’s worth—stashed away in the attic of a long-abandoned home near what used to be the headland but is now underwater; the after is a boat, and that’s as far as Billie sees fit to plan. It’s a funny thing, being a part of Daud’s circle: the pay is nothing too extravagant, not after the take from a single job is divided among the lot of them—and yet, with little to spend it on and no bank vault to store it in, the men tend to accumulate modest hoards of coin over the course of their service. The lucky ones who desert or resign presumably take their wages with them, wherever they go. The unlucky ones don’t, and given the day’s carnage, Billie’s willing to bet that Dunwall (or, at least, their section of it) is peppered with hidden caches of coin and small valuables whose owners will never be coming to collect them. _It’s not my fault. It’s my fault, but others were responsible too. It’s my fault, but I don’t regret it. Do I regret it? Is this what it was like for Daud, after the empress—?_ She can ponder that later. She’s made it to the particular rooftop she’s looking for.

She reaches the gap in it, where a few beams are broken, and carefully lowers herself into the dark mouth of the deserted rowhouse's attic. The air in here is damp and reeks of mildew and rotting wood from the lower levels, but the attic itself is, for the most part, structurally intact, and this is where Billie keeps an oilcloth bag full of coin. It’s impractical, really, to take it all with her—it’s cumbersome and will make her a target, she knows—and Billie’s been robbing rich folks long enough that the idea of finding herself without money doesn't pose a problem, exactly—and yet it’s a large enough sum and represents enough lives snuffed out by the edge of an assassin’s blade that leaving it behind seems...indecorous, almost. Not that that matters to Billie, who makes a brief mental calculation of risk versus potential reward, and decides it’s worth bringing along to wherever it is she’s going. She removes her overcoat, then waistcoat, and stuffs the latter down into the bag to muffle the metallic jangling; then puts her coat back on, slings the bag across one shoulder, and blinks back up to the roof. She won’t be back.

Now: to find a boat. This is the hitch, the bottleneck, in the race to cover ground. Lizzy would have been the obvious choice—she and Billie have a long and mostly cordial working relationship—but in this case it’s a non-starter: first, Lizzy might refuse, given the good terms she maintains with Daud; second, the Dead Eels prowl a bit too far upriver for Billie’s comfort at the moment—too far in the direction of Brigmore; third, and most pertinent, Lizzy is at present occupying a cell in Coldridge thanks to her mutinous first mate (because fucking of _course_ she is). Billie could almost laugh at the bitter irony. _Edgar’s a fool. What was he thinking?_ she wonders, not for the first time, and then consciously chooses not to follow that line of thought any further. Next is finding a boat, and anything else is a distraction.

The problem with finding a smuggler is that any smuggler who can be found without a great deal of trouble likely isn’t a very good smuggler, and given the option Billie would prefer to make it out of the city without being blasted into ash out on the water by the City Watch or the navy. There’s nothing to be done but prowl the riverside, up and down its many inlets and sloughs, and hope for a bit of luck. It might take days, and the thought of remaining stranded in such close proximity to Daud’s base makes Billie a bit antsy, but if she’s careful, and if Daud’s men know what’s best for them, she should be able to fill the gap without incident.

So she moves west, over rooftops and along the quay, taking detours to scout the canals when her vector brings her to an intersection. It’s a meandering track she travels, and though there’s nothing to be done for it, it’s not to Billie’s liking. Movement without intent or direction creates openings, potentially lethal, for a well-aimed weapon or a more decisive counterstep, and Billie feels exposed. What finds her, when it finds her, isn’t a bullet or bolt, though—although either might be preferable, as Billie can defend herself against those—but no. What catches her in her wanderings are Delilah’s parting words.

 _“Stupid child.”_ It shouldn’t have been such a kick in the gut—although, of course that was precisely how Delilah had intended it.

Billie would like very much not to think of Delilah ever again.

 _A cold hand, thumb brushing her cheek. Holding stock-still, suppressing a shudder at the breath on the back of her neck. Desire, unnamed and unnamable—_ STOP _—She had you. She had you held so fast. You were so stupid. A stupid child. Outsider._ A hundred small sensory memories wash over Billie and she can’t scan the water and think about _not_ thinking about Delilah at the same time and so she lets them. They’ll find her anyway, so long as she has nothing more immediate to occupy her head than the search for transport; all she can do is keep moving and concentrate as best as she can on the task at hand.

It’s not easy, since Billie wants to be sick at the thought of her. Delilah. The woman. No, she doesn’t want to be sick—she wants to peel away her very skin like she would the rind from an orange—she wants to scream loudly enough to drown out the residual images, the phantom touches, the _feeling of it all_ —and it wouldn’t do any good, because what Delilah had done, and—and this is what makes Billie’s face now convulse with disgust—what Billie had allowed to be done to herself would linger, small and insidious and unkillable—in the part of Billie’s brain that nothing in or of this world can scrub.

She takes two steps and retches over the edge of the roof. Then she steps back, stands up straight, and closes her eyes.

She's not frightened—she doesn’t know how to be frightened, or if she did, she’s long since forgotten—but this feeling of not being in control, this unsettlement, this invasion of her mind in whose soundness she always rested assured, is going to cause an unforgivable error—a mistimed transversal or a bolt in her back—if she doesn’t put it down right now.

_Stop this. Pull yourself together, you idiot, you stupid child. It’s not your fault; she made you do it._

That’s not entirely true, so she switches tack.

_You made the choice yourself. You did it because you wanted to._

That’s not entirely true either. She grinds her teeth, exhales and wills herself—the _her_ that her skin envelopes—as empty and dark as the Void.

_Keep going, and don’t look back._


	2. Dissolution

This is what had happened:

They'd started killing everyone, and Cecelia had run.

_No_ , she corrects herself. _Start from the beginning. What happened?_

They'd told everyone to gather in the yard—

She has told herself the story again and again over the last few hours, as if by repetition she can force some sense out of it. Like one of those nonsense phrases that’s just a loose jumble of words, but when it’s spoken aloud quickly and slurringly enough, the syllables fracture and recombine to form a new, coherent utterance. Or a chaotic mix of colored paints that takes a long minute of unfocused staring to see the hidden image emerge. If she tells it to herself once more, maybe this time some critical piece will shift and the rest will follow, falling into place, and she will have a narrative she can understand.

They'd told everyone to gather in the yard. _Who did?_ Lydia had told Cecelia, and Lydia had gotten it from Wallace, who had presumably gotten it from Lord Pendleton. _They'd told everyone?_ Well, Wallace and Lydia and Callista had all gone outside. Emily was up in her tower room. Piero and Anton Sokolov weren’t there, but the Admiral must have considered them part of “everyone,” because afterwards they—

_That was later on. Stay focused. What happened next?_

Cecelia would have gone too, but when Lydia had sent her to fetch Wallace, Wallace had laid into her without warning. He'd looked so tired—though maybe that was just because he had been packing Lord Pendleton’s belongings and hauling them downstairs for half the afternoon—but he'd looked—he'd almost looked as if he’d been crying. But when he had sneered at her, incredulously, “You think _you_ are entitled to a bonus? Given the quality of your work, it will be some time yet before you’re given so much as a penny extra,” it had been Cecelia who had come close to bursting into tears on the spot and who had been crying by the time she’d made it up to the attic landing. Wallace would scold her on occasion, yes, but it had stung less once she had realized that his harsher words usually followed an unkind or impatient remark from Lord Pendleton; and true, he was stingy with praise, but they’d all been strained to their limit for so long….He’d had never seemed so contemptuous, though. He must have known—

_Not yet. You went upstairs._

And cried. _Pathetic._ Quietly, so as not to draw attention, but all the same. She couldn’t say which was more humiliating: the lambasting itself or the weeping. She had thought—it had seemed stupid then and no less stupid now, given everything that happened after—but she honestly had thought, well, not that Wallace or Lydia or anyone was or ought to be proud of her, exactly. Just that she’d seen it through, the grand endeavor, and that had to count for something. She’d done the work of two maids at least, and it was just cleaning and laundry, and it wasn’t as if she couldn’t be replaced in a heartbeat by any of half the people who remained in this city, but she _hadn’t_ quit or been dismissed and she _hadn’t_ ratted them out, and a small part of her had felt (and maybe it was selfish and unearned) that their victory had in part been hers, too. Just a little.

She'd stood at the window overlooking the river, chest aching, watching the others trickle into the yard and feeling terribly alone in a way that usually only crept under her skin late at night when things were quiet enough for her to consider her place there. Wallace and Lydia formed a capable, if contentious, administrative partnership—the Admiral depended on Lydia to run the pub, and Lord Pendleton on Wallace; Piero’s work was obviously essential, as was Samuel’s; Callista was the empress’s own governess, and was basically a lady besides. (Though they were nearly of an age, Callista had responded with a sort of lukewarm politeness to Cecelia’s few awkward attempts to engage her in conversation, which even now make Cecelia blush with embarrassment to recall.)

Cecelia could lay no such claim to indispensability, though. Sweeping, dish-cleaning, fetching and carrying were all well and good, but the conspiracy would hardly implode for want of swept floors or clean glasses. Anyway, it wasn’t as if anyone ever told her anything sensitive or important—and yet she had occasionally allowed herself to entertain the fantasy that the daily peril she faced along with the rest of them might spur them to take her into the fold, into the nebulous _we_ that bound the conspiracy together.

She wistfully imagines the celebration at the Hound Pits after Corvo had returned from the Tower, imagines Lydia passing her a drink, imagines Wallace giving her a gruff “well done,” imagines telling a joke that makes Callista laugh, imagines Lord Pendleton and the others complimenting her bravery and hard work—or, not even complimenting her, just saying her name.

It’s wanton self-indulgence, a pleasant waking dream, all the more tinged in shame given that none of it had actually happened. In reality she’d worked through the party, hating herself for not just joining in the revelry of her own accord, hating herself for so badly wanting an invitation, hating herself for being so utterly unremarkable that no one had noticed she wasn’t taking part. Better the version which is a pleasant lie. After all, it doesn’t matter now: there will be no more parties at the Hound Pits. Never again with the same crowd, at least. There had been no _we_ , after all—or rather, there had been a _we_ , but Cecelia hadn’t been a part of it, fantasies of camaraderie aside.

Cecelia wonders whether Wallace had thought there was a _we_ as well, and if so, whom he had thought it was composed of. Whether Lydia— 

_Stop losing the thread. Focus on what you can recall, and think about that later._

The attic window. She had watched, partly out of the impulse to torment herself with what she had failed to earn, and partly out of curiosity. Such a fuss, she’d half expected Emily to knight them all, or reward them with titles. But Emily hadn't been down there, and Cecelia had been struck then with the first twinge of unease. What had it been? The quiet, maybe. No congratulations or claps on the back. No coin or papers in sight. Overseer Martin had begun to say something while the Admiral circled behind the Wallace and Lydia and Callista, but Cecelia couldn’t hear what it was he said; Callista kept looking backwards toward the tower where Emily was; Wallace’s thoughts seemed elsewhere—he was gazing out over the river, away from all of them, and he hadn’t even flinched when the Admiral unsheathed his pistol. Callista, darting another glance back, saw it too late and screamed at the same moment that Cecelia, from her attic vantage, as if in a distant dream, quietly uttered, “No—”

She’d seen Wallace’s skull shatter the moment before the sound of the pistol shot reached her. It all happened so fast that she hadn’t moved, hadn’t reacted at all, when Lydia wheeled around and had time to snarl, “ _Fuck yourself_ , you fucking—” before the second shot split her forehead open. Callista hadn’t run, just stumbled backward a step, as if dazed, lifting both hands in a placating gesture, but Cecelia hadn’t seen what happened next because Cecelia was already tearing through the hallway, down the flight of stairs, and then the next, as fast as her trembling legs could carry her. She hadn’t heard a third shot, but she hadn’t been listening for it: the world had turned to a sluggish nightmare, and she felt as though she were fighting her way through water, or deep grasping mud, and as if from a distance she could hear the pounding of footsteps and a strangled whimpering that she hadn’t realized must have been her own until later. 

She wasn’t going to make it—they’d come inside and intercept her in the pub—Martin would catch her, or the Admiral would shoot her as she fled—down the second-floor hallway she ran, through the servants’ room, and clambered through the window out onto the canopy. She'd crouched, dangling one leg over the edge and then the other, and without allowing herself to contemplate the height had dropped off the edge, landed hard on her backside, and scrambled to her feet. The street had seemed impossibly wide, crossing it like crossing the river: an endless open expanse whose far side seemed to recede no matter how hard she ran, and she wasn’t going to make it—someone was going to look out the window, or come through the side gate and see her—and she couldn’t fumble the key out of her pocket, couldn’t fit it into the keyhole—

“Please—” she’d sobbed tearlessly, “Oh, please, please—” and finally, finally, the latch clicked and she was inside with the door closed behind her, lying flat on her stomach with her hands covering the back of her skull, as if any moment she expected the ceiling to cave in above her.

_And then? What else do you remember? There must be something else._

There was nothing. Not for some time. The shadows in the room had grown long and crept up the wall. Then yelling again: the lady Emily, and someone who must have been Callista, who must not have been shot with the others. She couldn’t make out Callista’s words, but Emily was screaming for Corvo, over and over. Cecelia had shut her eyes and covered her ears to stop it, _stop it_. Finally silence once more.

How long had she lain on the uneven plank floor, curled as small as she could make herself, too paralyzed with fear to move? The room darkened, and still she lay silently, waiting for the pounding at the door and the shouting of armed men. Waiting, and waiting, and nowhere to go.

_Coward._

Cecelia doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she had been awakened by the whole world shaking; it had taken her several moments to remember where she was, and why, and still longer to recognize the trembling as the great earth-shattering steps of a tallboy stalking up the street toward the apartment. The terror had seized her once more, crashing over her like a bucketful of hot water, and she had crawled downstairs to the lower level, unsure of what she feared more: tallboys and guardsmen, here to sniff her out and kill her like the others, or Dunwall’s sewers and all that lurked within them. She had hoped desperately not to have to choose between them— _Let them pass me by, let them not think to check this block, please_ —and hopes not to have to choose in the future, either.

Cecelia doesn’t understand. She’s stupid, she must be, there must be something else, some key detail she’s forgotten that would explain why, _why why_ —

Was that really all there was, then? It is all Cecelia can remember until Corvo had appeared while she was trying to pry open the door that would open, not to the sewer, but to the alley between her apartment block and the one behind. She had almost fainted from the shock: he was dripping wet and reeking of sewage, and he looked awful—he looked almost the way he had when she had first met him after his escape from Coldridge—but he was alive and unbloodied save for a nasty bruise at his temple.

Embarrassment steals over her again when she remembers how she’d babbled nonsense at him, how he must have understood implicitly that Emily had been taken and she’d done nothing, nothing to stop it and yet he had not admonished her for it—only listened and frowned and sighed so heavily when she'd told him how the others had died. Maybe he was too tired to rebuke her; maybe he was too worried about Emily; maybe her disjointed rambling and inaction had not disappointed him simply because had expected nothing better from her, useless simpleton that she was. 

“I’m glad to see you alive,” he’d told her in his solemn way. “And I’m sorry.” Cecelia has a hard time believing that it was her, personally, that he'd been glad to see, but she doesn’t mind because Corvo is brave and, she thinks, probably good too, and she’d been glad to see him too. _Glad_ is the wrong word. From the moment he had arrived, the fear that had her heart and mind in a rigid vice loosened just a bit, and that was better than glad, better than anything she’d felt for the last two days since the regent was deposed—maybe better than that, too.

She hadn’t been able to think of anything useful or comforting to tell him as he made to leave the apartment to find the others, but the pressure to say something had overwhelmed her as he was slipping out the door. “Corvo?” He’d paused. “I know you’ll find her.” _What an asinine, thoughtless comment. She knew no such thing. They could have done anything with Emily, no thanks to her, who had fled and cowered here all night._

He’d stared at her for a moment, expression utterly unreadable, and Cecelia had wanted to sink through the floor in shame and instantaneous regret. But then he’d only nodded—just once, deeply enough that it was half a bow—and had said in that earnest, stilted manner of his that might have been courtly had he not always appeared so hesitant to deliver his every word, “Soon this will all be over.” And then he was gone, and Cecelia had been left with those words reverberating in her chest.

Soon this will all be over.

_And now what?_ she wonders. She could stay here and wait: wait for the rumbling of the tallboys to cease, wait for Corvo to find Emily and set her on the throne and clear his name, wait for an end to the plague (or else, wait for Dunwall to finish collapsing over her head), wait for the City Watch or someone worse to find her and kill her anyway, wait for her parents and sister to return to the city, wait for everything that might happen to happen. Or she could run. Elsewhere. Anywhere. There are ways out, she knows this. Others have made it before her—she doesn’t know quite how, or where they’ve gone, but she knows it’s possible. _Soon this will all be over._ She doesn’t have any money—or anything else, truthfully—but what she might have, what Corvo might be able to give her as he sneaks through the pub, is the opportunity.

If she can slip across the road, if she can scramble down to the river’s edge and circumvent the barricade, if she can go unnoticed just one more time...

_Soon this will all be over._

Samuel’s out there somewhere, she knows it. She’s going to find him, and, with his help, she’s going to leave this place for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> geez, sorry for so much exposition :/ next chapter: cecelia again, but things begin to happen.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll do my very best to post chapters weekly! Up next: Cecelia


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